Lawmaking in Russia: Tricks of the trade

The Party of Liberal Democrats, led by the flamboyant Vladimir Zhirinovsky (on the photo), have proposed a ban on appearing in public places for several hours after eating garlic, so as to save law-abiding Russians from the irritating smell. Source: Photoshot / Vostock Photo

The lower chamber of the Russian parliament, the Duma, set a new record before the 2013 summer recess by passing as many as 261 new bills. Some of them have caused quite a stir, including the laws banning the propaganda of homosexuality, making it a criminal offense to insult religious feelings, sharply increasing fines for traffic violations, and disbanding the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Sharp-tongued critics have dubbed the
Russian parliament “a jet printer gone berserk,” and experts insist that many
of the 261 new bills the legislative body recently passed are deeply flawed.
Meanwhile, the Duma’s recent attempt to declare an amnesty for economic crimes
has been an utter failure.

The idea was to release 110,000–120,000
entrepreneurs jailed for various business shenanigans, but the final version of
the bill is so watered down that a mere 300 people will gain their freedom
early.

The Russian parliament consists of the
lower chamber (the Duma) and the upper chamber (the Federation Council). Bills
adopted by the Duma are subject to the Federation Council's scrutiny. The Duma
has 450 members who represent various political parties and are elected by a
system of proportional representation. The Federation Council has two members
from each of the 83 Russian provinces.

Once a bill is adopted by the Duma and
approved by the Federation Council, it is submitted to the president for
signature. The president can either sign or exercise his right of veto. Once
the president has signed the bill, it enters into force immediately upon
publication in the state-owned newspaper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, unless the bill
itself specifies another date.

Bills can be introduced for the Russian
Duma's consideration by Duma members, Federation Council members, the
president, the Cabinet, regional legislatures, and the top Russian courts,
including the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, and the High Court of
Arbitration.

As of early September 2013, there were 1,704 bills awaiting their
turn for the Duma hearing; 836 of them were introduced by Duma members,
followed by regional legislatures (455 bills), Federation Council members
(183), the Cabinet (181), the president (34), and the Supreme Court and the
High Court of Arbitration (15 bills between the two of them). There were no
bills awaiting a Duma hearing from the Constitutional Court.

During the spring 2013 parliament
session, which lasted from January to July, the Duma heard a record 639 bills.
Out of that number, 261 bills were approved. That is fewer than the 338 bills
approved during the entire year of 2012, but more than the second convocation
of the Duma (elected in 1995 and dissolved in 1999) had approved during the
entire four years of its existence (223).

The Duma has also decided that media
outlets can be shut down for publishing swear words. In addition, it has banned
smoking on staircases in apartment blocks and made it compulsory for websites
to take down pirated audio and video material.

“The highlight of the spring session of
the Russian Duma was an ostentatious crusade for morality, in an effort to
distract the public’s attention from oppressive new laws,” says Pavel Salin,
head of the Center for Political Studies.

"The government now wants to see
how the public will react, in order to decide whether to risk any new crackdown
measures.” Andrei Piontkovskiy, a political analyst, has scathingly described
the Duma as "a jet printer gone berserk.” The Russian parliament “is now
spewing out huge numbers of damaging, half-baked and simply stupid laws,” in his
view.

What are the chances of a bill being
approved once it has been introduced to the Duma? That depends, to a large
degree, on who introduced it. The majority in the Duma (238 seats out of 450,
or 53 percent) is currently held by the pro-Putin United Russia party.

The Duma
therefore invariably approves all the bills submitted by President Putin. It
also backs most of the bills drafted by the Cabinet. Yet it rejects more than
90 percent of the bills proposed by its own members, Federation Council
members, and regional legislatures.

Mark Urnov, lead researcher at the
Applied Political Sciences department of the Higher School of Economics in
Moscow, says that lawmaking has become the prerogative of the Russian Cabinet
and the president's office. "That is where everything is decided, even
before the proposed bill reaches parliament,” he says. “That is also where all
the lobbying is done in Russia.”

Once the bill has been introduced to
parliament, it takes three separate hearings for it to be approved. The only
exception is the federal budget, which requires four hearings. During the first
hearing, the legislature approves the overall principles of the bill.

During
the second, it approves or rejects various amendments. During the third, it
polishes the final phrasing. The tricky bit is that, during the second hearing,
the bill can be "amended" almost beyond recognition.

For example, in 2006, amendments to the
proposed new election law removed the minimum turnout requirement (50 percent
for federal elections and 25 percent for regional and local polls), and
abolished the "against everyone" choice in the ballot papers for
those who do not support any of the candidates.

By doing so, the Russian Duma
neutralized a powerful instrument that the opposition could previously use to
invalidate the poll if its candidates had been barred from running under
various pretexts. It became pointless for the opposition to call on its
supporters to stay away from the polling stations or to vote "against
everyone."

These crucial changes were introduced as "amendments"
during the second hearing; the original version of the bill did not contain any
such clauses.

A similar trick may well be pulled off
this autumn, when the Duma is scheduled to hold the third hearing of the bill
on the reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Cabinet introduced the
bill only a week before the summer recess, but the Duma had managed to hold the
first two hearings in that short period of time, despite protestations by the
Academy itself. In the bill, the Cabinet proposes to abolish the Russian
Academy of Sciences in its current form.

It also wants to divide the Academy's
research institutes into two groups: the ones deemed "effective" will
be subordinated to the relevant government agencies in charge of the respective
branches of industry. The ones deemed "ineffective" will be shut
down. It is not being ruled out that, during the fall session, the Duma will
hold a repeat second hearing of the bill to make further amendments.

During the
spring session, parliament members had only two days between the first and the
second hearing to draw up their proposed amendments, so most of them had simply
run out of time.

The current Duma holds its hearings of
the bills in too much haste, and the quality of the resulting legislation
suffers accordingly, argues Dmitry Abzalov, vice president of the Center for
Strategic Communications.

“They pass the headline laws, but there are no
bylaws, so the former cannot be properly put into practice," he says. “A
classic example is the half-baked amnesty for entrepreneurs jailed for economic
offenses.”

The initial version of the bill, which
was submitted by the parliamentary business ombudsman Boris Titov, would have
enabled the release of 110,000–120,000 people convicted of economic offenses.
After numerous amendments, however, the number of people who will benefit from
the bill has fallen to just 3,000, and a mere 300 will actually be released
from jails and pre-trial detention centers.

Very little depends in the Russian Duma
on individual members representing the pro-Putin United Russia party. Each
Monday, the United Russia parliamentary faction holds a meeting that decides
how the party will vote on each individual bill; its members must obey these
decisions. Many do not even bother showing up in parliament; they merely give
their voting cards to their party colleagues, so that they could cast the vote
for them.

The Duma makes its decisions by
electronic voting: Deputies insert their voting cards in their individual slots
to identify themselves and then press one of three buttons (Yes, No, or
Abstain) before the 10 seconds allotted for each vote expire.

During that
10-second countdown, every one of the United Russia members "holding the
fort" must press the necessary buttons for 6–8 of their missing colleagues
who gave them their voting cards.

Related:

As for the members representing the three
other parliamentary parties (the Communist Party, A Just Russia, and the
Liberal Democratic Party), nothing depends on them whatsoever. Their only
weapon is the co-called Italian Strike — a tactic whereby their members introduce
hundreds of amendments to every bill, forcing the United Russia members to
spend long hours rejecting those amendments. That tactic was used in the spring
of 2012, when the Duma was debating huge new fines of up to 30,000 rubles
($900) for members of the public taking part in unauthorized rallies.

Another favorite pastime of the
opposition Duma deputies is to introduce blatantly populist or patently
ridiculous bills that have no chance of being passed. For example, the
Communists have proposed spending Russia’s entire gold and currency reserve on
payouts to parents for each newborn baby, in order to halt the population
decline.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, led by the flamboyant Vladimir
Zhirinovsky, have proposed a ban on appearing in public places for several
hours after eating garlic, so as to save law-abiding Russians from the
irritating smell.